Review: Yakuza Graveyard

[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

The first movie I ever saw at Japan Society, way back in the ancient pre-COVID days of 2017, was a Meiko Kaji vehicle—specifically Blind Woman’s Curse, a delightfully weird relic of ‘70s exploitation cinema that blends chanbara action, horror, grotesque comedy, and Butoh into an unclassifiable cocktail of disparate yet harmonious artistic disciplines. So obviously, when the venue’s fine film programmers recently announced another retrospective celebrating the legendary actress’ career, I knew that I had to attend at least one screening.

I decided to go with Yakuza Graveyard, and it turned out to be the perfect choice: Kaji simply belongs in Kinji Fukasaku’s morally complex world of rival gangsters, corporate greed, and corrupt institutions of power, delivering a rich, nuanced performance that complements—and occasionally elevates—the director’s intentionally contradictory visual style (which mixes the maximalist tone of a Hollywood melodrama with the naturalism and immediacy of a documentary—particularly apparent in the handheld camerawork and the chaotic, unceremonious depiction of violence). In one pivotal scene, the protagonist—a reckless, hotheaded cowboy cop that is “heroic” only in comparison to his relatively “by-the-book” superior officers, who transparently manipulate the letter of the law to benefit those with enough wealth, privilege, and political influence (i.e., "legitimate"/white-collar criminals) to buy the department’s cooperation—growls his way through a poetic description of the sea that is equally applicable to his costar’s enigmatic character:

Sometimes it’s furious. Sometimes it’s playful. Around here, it even changes colors.

Kaji portrays the wife of an imprisoned yakuza underboss, dutifully acting as his organization’s treasurer while he serves his fifteen-year sentence. When she’s introduced, she projects an air of cool, unflappable professionalism, navigating the male-dominated gambling dens and war councils with practiced ease. As the plot unfolds, however, her repressed trauma and insecurity gradually emerge. Born to a Japanese mother and a Korean father, she’s always been an outsider, rejected by both of her parents’ cultures—as she laments near the story’s climax: “I’m not Japanese! I’m not Korean! I'm not even a half-breed! I’m nothing! I wish I was a spirit so I could float away from here!” Marriage provided little reprieve from her solitude: her husband frequently pimped her out to pay off his considerable debts, leading her to seek solace in the numbing embrace of narcotics—an addiction that eventually resurfaces amidst the increasing psychological strain of her clan’s slow, inexorable dissolution.

It’s a challenging role, demanding varying degrees of subtlety, vulnerability, and emotional volatility over the course of the narrative arc; fortunately, Kaji is absolutely up to the task, effortlessly commanding the screen regardless of the surrounding context—sometimes furious, sometimes playful, but consistently confident, magnetic, and utterly captivating.